


Revenant

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Community: best_enemies, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-19 13:46:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1472038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He is at once living with the ghost and the corpse of the man he loves. The Doctor thinks of how unfailingly he has done what he should when it comes to the Master." (a tidied old b_e table challenge prompt)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revenant

**Author's Note:**

> Title: Revenant  
> Author: [](http://x-los.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://x-los.livejournal.com/)**x_los**  
>  Rating: NC-17  
> Pairing: Three/Crispy!Master  
> Summary: "He is at once living with the ghost and the corpse of the man he loves. The Doctor thinks of how unfailingly he has done what he should when it comes to the Master." (a tidied old b_e table challenge prompt)  
> Beta: [](http://elviaprose.livejournal.com/profile)[**elviaprose**](http://elviaprose.livejournal.com/) , [](http://aralias.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://aralias.livejournal.com/)**aralias**
> 
> ***

In no one way is he at fault. If he looks at the steps that have led them to this point as discrete incidents, the Doctor has been right in every instance, and bears no guilt for the Master’s condition. He’d had little choice but to escape alone in his TARDIS, stranding the Master on the Ogron homeworld at the mercy of the Daleks. The Master himself had forced his hand. In the preceding few years, the Master had offered him any number of opportunities to put aside their differences. Chances had been countless and immutable as stars in the sky. The Doctor had thought of the opportunity to mend things between them as his own special property. (As it should be--he’d bought it dearly, long ago.) And every no had been considered, and well deserved. The Doctor can not in good conscience regret a single one of them.

If he thinks about the question more abstractly, he might trace a fine thread of culpability back through the centuries. He could take unto himself the obscure guilt of the original sin. If he’d not left things as he had, the Master might well never have come to this. But he knows now, as he knew then, that his decision to leave was justified. He had every right.

In every particular, the Doctor is blameless. In their collusion he is covered in blame, sick with it, and he is a skeleton of guilt, stretched over with thin skin, the better to resemble a man.

The Doctor assembles a tray of breakfast.

Food is a problem (he remembers the other man’s favorites like old women remember the birthdays of dead friends). _Nutrition_ , that better approaches the business they’re about now. Nutrition is a problem. To say his system is weak is a colossal understatement. They’d be better off with a drip, but, albeit painfully, the Master can still manage to eat. And if he can manage to, then the Doctor understands without asking that the Master must.

The Doctor watches him try to do so, schooling his expression at the sound of the Master’s hiss as the broken skin of his fingers cracks against the soft, warm plastic of the spoon. The Master loves rich things, the Doctor remembers incongruously as the Master slowly, laboriously, manages to lift the spoon of medicine-crammed gruel to his ruined lips. Strong flavors.

Misjudging the angle, as he often does now that one of his eardrums has been burned away and his sense of balance destroyed, the Master grazes his bottom lip with the spoon. It would be nothing to anyone else. For better or worse, in excellence and in illness both, the Master manages to be entirely unique: the delicate skin there splits open like a ripe fruit. He bleeds, and only because he is himself does he manage not to scream or cry like a child in frustration and agony.

The Master likes asparagus, and too-sweet rose lassi that leaves you choking in the cloying press of its floral stench. The Doctor, without a look of horror or pity or despair, careful now as he was careless before, raises the wet cloth he prepares each day with the breakfast tray, in case of mishaps. He blots the Master’s lip with incredible gentleness. His soft ‘there’ is nearly just breath. The Doctor is, ironically, unsuited to such care, but to seek some attendant whose mind is well-suited to and whose heart isn’t lacerated by this work would be neither devoted nor penitent.

The Master, he thinks, as he watches the other man again lift the spoon (the belly of which is smeared with the his own blood), _loves_ a very rare steak.

* * *

Most of the Master’s mental energy is occupied in clamping down on his pain centers, and this is exhausting even as it is tedious. Whole days are lost to simple pain management. The Doctor does what he can to keep the Master company, and this afternoon he is reading to him. The book’s the sort of classic Gallifreyan political intrigue that always bored the Doctor to tears and always entertained the Master enormously. The Master’s comment, after an afternoon of entire silence, interrupts one of the book’s many dramatic reveal scenes, in which people who had quadruple-crossed each other own up to it in an ecstasy of hubris.

“Why couldn’t you have left me to die.” There is more resignation in the words than the Doctor has ever heard from the Master, who is never resigned to anything. It is not a question. The Doctor shuts his book. Waits.

“You should have,” the Master observes. “When you followed me. When you found me on that blighted world. You should have left me there to die.” He is looking at nothing: his eyes are creamy with cataracts now. The Doctor knows that the Master compensates for the wreck of his ears with the few fragments of his considerable psychic power that aren’t occupied carrying out the ceaseless regime, the unending duty of pressing down the Master’s pain. The Doctor further suspects that the Master uses his mind more than his eyes to see, now.

The Master turns towards him. The Doctor appreciates the beauty of the Master’s last body now, more than he ever did when the Master would have gladly offered himself up to him. In the blackened, parched skin the Doctor can remember olive. In the hateful, loathsome eyes he can see again that close-kept, unbearable tenderness. The Doctor thinks double. He is at once living with the ghost and the corpse of the man he loves.

The Doctor thinks of how unfailingly he has done what he should when it comes to the Master.

“You could still kill me now.” In the Doctor’s mind the Master’s voice is rich as the beloved foods he can no longer eat; cultured as he is now primitive, a thing of pain and rage; indulgent as he is now unforgiving, to suggest this after all the care the Doctor lavishes on him. Care that can never be anything but inadequate, by its very nature, but which bends the Doctor past what he had imagined to be his breaking point. Care that consumes all of him, and wasn’t that what the Master always wanted.

“You should.” The Master’s voice has a note of its old seduction. The Doctor hears it almost as self-parody, is surprised by the sudden, bitter collision of body and spirit, his Masters both. “What _haven’t_ I done to deserve it?”

“I’m terribly tired,” the Doctor murmurs, “of doing what I should do.” He closes the book—the Master has not been listening, these last hours. “I’ll go fetch you some of your vitamin tea, shall I?” He asks questions he pretends are not rhetorical. The language the Doctor uses implies that the Master still has the power of discrimination. To listen to him, it is as if the Master might say no, or would be able to stop the Doctor if he wanted to, or rise from the bed without excruciating agony. The Doctor stands to leave.

“I thought I would always love you,” the Master tells the Doctor’s back. He cannot see the muscles stiffen under the velvet jacket with what is left of his eyes. “I wanted to.” He chuckles. “Isn’t that ridiculous? When it was so inconvenient, so,” his breath hitches at equating the wounds, “painful, so much of the time. But I thought that whatever I might do or become, you and the love of you would remain there, at the core of me, you see. This has driven away so much. I blame you—I’d never have thought I could have. Everything in me is exhausted but this _loathing_ —and you’re the only thing I have left to hate.”

The Doctor swallows, and, without comment, leaves. Fetches the tea. He cannot know what the Master will say—pain makes him wildly variable, desperate and delusional, terribly cruel. Or. He’s still clever. He might be trying to coerce the Doctor to kill him. Or he might mean every word of it.

The Master slips into sleep. He is happier, there, and the Doctor can catch his own meager rest. In the morning he will wake to another day, parked in the void, taking care of the Master. Someone must take care of him. The Doctor is the only one who loves him. And he might have stopped this, any one of a thousand times.

* * *

It is archeology. He has his hands on the ruin, trembling soft and very careful. He is trying to bathe the Master, and it is necessary to prevent dead skin from sloughing into open wounds, and it is never accomplished without pain. A tub would perhaps make things easier, but it is logistically out of the question. The pain of moving the Master outweighs almost any potential benefit. Matter-transport him, and he’d come apart at the seams. The Master’s broken body is a luddite, rejecting even the most basic technological attempts to improve its lot. But then Time Lord bodies never cope well with trauma, past a certain point. They are supposed to regenerate at times of crisis rather than heal, and they seem to know it. The trouble is, the Master has thoroughly exhausted that option.

The Doctor is running a wet cloth over the Master’s neck, and the Master shivers. The Doctor blinks, because it didn’t look quite like pain. More slowly, with eyes narrowed, he runs the cloth from the Master’s shoulder to his collar bone. The Master fixes his eyes on him, a horrible stare the Doctor holds.

The Doctor trails his hand down from the collarbone, more softly than he would have thought this hasty, aggressive body could manage. Down his chest. Across his pelvic bone. The Master hisses in pain, and. There is sensation here, and cautiously, the Master’s mental block eases—perhaps unconsciously. It relaxes, allowing in a little more pain and a little more not-quite-pain.

The Doctor’s throat feels as dry as the Master’s skin.

“Let me,” he whispers.

The Master says nothing. His chest rises and falls with a heavy breath, and in the periphery of his vision, the Doctor can see the Master’s skeletal ribs.

He lays a hand over the remains of the Master’s sex.

“Please.” He nudges his mind towards the Master’s, as thankful the Time Lords restored his ability to do so as if this had been the express purpose of having a mind that could touch, could share agony and offer comfort.

The Master, at cost to himself, inclines his wrecked head in an affirmative. For once the ghost and corpse can touch, and his eyes have the meagerest hint of their old indulgence.

The Doctor tries his hand, and then his mouth. He is unrelentingly gentle, acquiescent to the Master’s slightest twitch of discomfort as he never was to the Master’s most stringent pleas for attention, for acceptance.

Coming has the unforeseen side effect of distracting the Master enough that he drops his barriers entirely, and he screams when the pain rushes in with the crest or orgasm. He recovers himself quickly, afterglow lost in the scrabble for self-awareness.

“I’m sorry,” the Doctor gasps immediately, panicked and flushed as if it had been his own body in revolt, “I’m sorry.”

The Master’s breath comes in pants, and it is minutes before it slows.

“I’m—” He stops with a grimace before reassuring the Doctor that he’s fine, that he’s all right, because he obviously isn’t and is never going to be. The Doctor runs a troubled hand through his white hair. He slumps off the bed and into the chair beside it, braces his elbows on the sheets, and buries his face in his palms.

After a minute the Master speaks. “It’s—an opportunity cost.”

The Doctor looks up at him, confused. The Master clarifies his meaning.

“I’ll need time to recover,” he offers, hesitating a moment. “A day, possibly two. But then.”

The Doctor comes to understand. He smiles at the Master, a bittersweet tension overlaid on top of his long-missing grin.

“I love you.”

The Master's eyes are calmer now, and he takes this with a silence that is nearly companionable.


End file.
